Dinking

Summer seventy-two’s racking
had nursery blue uprights, block board shelves,
and prayed to the far wall,
waiting to swallow its daily snacks.
Back door bell, a screech of wood to floor
and lunch stepped in.
Three hundred Vincent singles,
a hundred Popcorn, and two hundred
Whiter shades of pale, almost Dulux,
all for London’s jukeboxes, June was good.
Shame we hadn’t ordered them dinked.
So the hand stamp, bang, bang, banged
six hundred times, making their holes fit
Seeburg, Rock-Ola, Rota-Rolla
even that superb, rare AMI Deauville!
As we fed each shelf, split each order
we grooved to the latest hits on our Garard 301
jammed in a one-phone office,
behind Shepherds Bush shopping centre.
Python Lee Jackson, In a broken dream, led the way
Metal guru, Lady Eleanor, Rocket man,
we just didn’t care.
And on special days,
after thousands of vinyl dinks
we’d celebrate in our Wimpy bar,
before a brisk, diving browse
through the first Argos.

Jerry Pike

August

Another week of summer gone
The days are slipping past
The autumn rains come marching on
Time runs so fast.

Hardly seems a week or two
Since snow was on the hills
And all the gardens shining new
With daffodils.

The phlox, the lillies, they attend
the summer's grand parade
now linger to their tattered end,
and roses fade:

And while I bask in summer’s rays
There’s gnawing in my mind
And through the bleak and bitter days
Creep close behind.

Old father time hold on a tick!
Slow down for pity’s sake!
Why do you need to run so quick?
Put on the brake!

John Waddell

Housewife

With busy needle, thimble, treadle,
she turned bed sheets sides to middle,
let down hems, inserted lengtheners.
Pockets made patch elbow strengtheners.

Every inch of her back garden
grew successions of abundant
vegetables, fruit ? delicious,
picked to eat with Same?day freshness.

Plums Preserved in lines of bottles,
jams in jars and onions pickled,
serried rows on shelves in pantry
testament to her. No entry.

In a book ever recorded
how she worked.Quite unrewarded,
just the striving for perfection
gave her ail her motivation.

Surely there's nobility
a true, though quiet celebrity,
when such a woman daily tries
with little means to reach the skies.

Dorothy Pope

Sita in the Modern World

Sita in the Modern World



Many years after, several thousand in fact,

after Ravana was reborn in the hierarchies

of capital and its politics of jealousy,

once more she finds herself isolated by his power.

Knowing Rama to be busy and Lakshmana useless,

she fends off snorts and dismissive shrugs

not by tapping unseen powers

nor by retaliation with an icy gaze

nor some verbal rejoinder,

though all these are at her disposal.

No, she greets attacks of this sort

and the ritual of the gang’s hostile chorus,

with the quiet understanding

that is her steady and unflinching purpose.



Maybe somewhere there is a vault

hidden beneath dark arctic wastes

where busy clerks record each snide snub

for posterity in careful, cautious ledgers.

If so, she knows nothing of these

fault finders and would care less;

future reckonings of right and wrong

before crestfallen villains in the dock

are no concern of hers at all.

So, sitting patiently in her neat suit,

she lets the insults flow on as they will,

comes through their buffeting like a statue,

unchanging and resolute.



Perhaps from time to time she permits

brief inner visions of herself as superhero

winking to an imagined camera

as she speeds on through the air.

But these are small aberrations

in her unswerving mission to bring care

to the tormented butterflies hidden all about her.


Peter Keeble